I am preparing to tell and publish the following short story. I welcome candid comments on how to improve it. What would you change, add, or subtract? If you make comments in the text, please do so in CAPITAL LETTERS, so I can clearly distinguish your words from mine. Thanks for any help. SB

Veterans’ Love Story:
Valentine’s Day, 2007

DRAFT: CRITICISMS SOLICITED, to [email protected]

By Shepherd Bliss (1674 words)

Over 40 years ago I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, following the tradition of the many Bliss men who went into the military. I did my basic training at Ft. Riley, Kansas, home of the Big Red One, First Division. During those turbulent sixties, I took an oath to defend my country and its Constitution. I have kept that oath. I continue to believe in Duty, Honor, and County.

I have a short story to tell. It’s a veterans’ love story, plural. I have been unable to tell this much of our story until this year, for various reasons, though I have told some of it before. I tell it partly to plead for forgiveness, for myself and for others caught in the path of war and the things that some of us do.

I write this short story for various reasons, including to help civilians understand the importance of Lt. Erin Watada’s wise and brave decision not to deploy to the Iraq War. Rather than being “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” as the Army alleges, his behavior is that which can prevent a version of the following happening to him, as it has to many soldiers.

The short story that follows is collective, rather than merely individual, combining the experiences of various veterans since at least World War II. Our story begins as a nightmare. Please stay with it to the end, through the difficulties. Love is often difficult, as we know.

***********

“AT EASE!” the young lieutenant barks at our rifle squad, tired from a long march. We are outside Da Nang.

“You, soldier!” he points in my face.

“Yes sir!” I stiffen to attention.

“See that cave?”

“Yes sir!”

“Charlie’s in there. He’s hiding. Hunt him down. Smoke him out!”

“Yes sir!”

The last cave I entered, looking for VC, flashes in my mind. I felt like a mole. Poisonous snakes might attack me. Trapped in a small space, unable to see very well, I didn’t want to go back into another smelly tunnel. What if the enemy set a trap?

This is not Ft. Riley, Kansas, where I did my basic training. I’m still a teenager. But these are no longer boys playing in the woods, which I enjoyed doing. I had been in-country only a few weeks—this boy soldier.

“Come on out,” we yelled. “We know you’re in there.”

We waited. “Come on out.” We waited for what seemed like a long time.

Hearing no sound, we assumed no one was inside. So we finally threw a few firecracker grenades in, counting them as they exploded—One, two, three…Yes! July 4th—explosions, a light show.

Expecting no one inside, we edged in…

Body parts everywhere.

We couldn’t look at each other, hung our heads in shame, unable to say anything.

We needed a body count. We tallied parts of seven small bodies…and nine old, thin bodies of small-boned people. That was a tiny cave. The one I was just commanded to enter is huge.

I take my flashlight and M16. now a seasoned veteran at the age of nineteen. I’m on a manhunt into a cave again, now carrying small-boned people inside me.

Each family has staked out a little space in this dank dungeon. The stench hits me first—holes in the ground for excrement. I gag, want to throw up. I’m trained, disciplined, but not for this.

Acrid smoke hits my eyes—small fires for light and cooking—blinding this mole even more. No wind, no ventilation, no water. This is surely hell. How blind we are.

I mumble, grope forward, try to avoid stepping on bodies. Hundreds are lying, sitting, crouching—children screaming, old men and women coughing or moaning.

No men of fighting age, yet.

Far into the cave, my head hits the ceiling and I fall to my knees. I throw out a hand, touching not the filthy floor, but the fingers and palm of a young woman’s hand. Our survivals are suddenly linked. Our eyes meet, and a rush enters my body.

Is she the enemy?

Where am I?

What am I hunting?

Who is this woman?

I feel her grasp become a clasp—sensuous, even amorous, tracing the lifeline on my palm. She traces the lifeline on my palm. She seems to long for, want, something from me. Her touch is firm, yet gentle. A feeling of connection surges through me.

Unable to surrender to her feeling and relate to her, I release my hand, mumble an apology, and bolt out of the cave. Outside, I hold my splitting head in my hands.

How could anyone experience desire in such a hellhole?

*************

These stories are true. However, this short story is a composite that includes my own real experience being raised in a military family and having been in the Army and the experiences of others. As a member of the Veterans’ Writing Group for the last decade, we have been telling, writing, and listening to personal stories. This story includes Michael’s story as a young officer in Vietnam, Glenn’s story from World War II and my father’s untold stories. It is a collective veterans’ story. I have carried it inside myself for decades and now need to break the “Code Blue” silence and reveal this aspect of war-making.

I began writing this short story (which has had such a long life inside me) as a poem in 200l. The United States had started to attack Afghanistan, using bombs to flush people out of caves. I was haunted by knowing that there were more than soldiers in those caves. Entire families were taking refuge in the ground, which has long provided some sanctuary from war-making; modern high-tech weapons can now even penetrate and destroy life underground.

Though this story does not yet feel finished, it is time to begin telling it and putting it in print, as the United States continues its war-making in Iraq and threatens other countries, such as Iran.

A vivid memory I have from Iraq War 1 triggered this story. I was watching television in New Mexico with my girlfriend Elena Avila, a Chicana whose father worked for many years at Ft. Bliss, Texas, named after one of my ancestors. Her son was in the military at the time. She shook her head and lamented something like, “Brown on brown, our boys killing their boys. It’s not fair. “

After 9/11, I accepted a teaching position at the University of Hawai’i. Many dark-skinned people from Hawai’i and elsewhere are on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am proud of Lt. Erin Watada, a Hawaiian, for having the courage to refuse deployment in the current illegal, immoral Iraq War. When his father and step-mother came to my hometown to fully support their son, it was bittersweet to hear them. My mother and father were unable to support my refusal to serve in the military during the Vietnam War, something that I carried for many years.

You may wonder why I call this a “love story.” There is only a brief moment of desire expressed near the end, to which the soldier is unable to fully surrender, though he did terminate his search and destroy mission. This is the climax to which the story leads; the Vietnamese woman’s ability to feel compassion for and connection to someone who might even kill her transforms the soldier and the story. Such a flash of love can shine brightly, change behavior, and be redemptive. A moment of deep love under difficult circumstances can change a life.

In addition to that Vietnamese woman’s love, for that is how it felt, I want to express my deep personal love to the following people:

My first adult girlfriend, Marilyn Yeo. As a University of Kansas undergraduate in the sixties she challenged my participation in the military during the Vietnam War. She may have saved my life, and certainly reduced damage to my soul. She also took me to hear my next great love:

Martin Luther King, Jr., who presented such a compelling case against war that I decided to resign my commission, before seeing combat, and not go to war. My buddies who did go to war were not as fortunate, even those who came back. I listen to their stories and try to re-tell some of them by weaving them together into a coherent whole in an attempt to describe for civilians what happens to men in battle.

My former girlfriend Elena Avila, a curandera (folk healer), for the time we spent together and how much she taught me about indigenous and Mexican people.

The Veteran’s Writing Group, with whom I have met for around a decade now, under the able leadership of Maxine Hong Kingston. In the fall we published our book “Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace,” where I wrote about the trauma of being raised in a military family. Writing that story, which I had been unable to write before, has released substantial energy in me.

I love you—unknown Vietnamese woman in the cave, Marilyn, Martin, Elena, and brother and sister vets. I pledge to do my best to stop war. For my shortcomings, I ask for your forgiveness.

As I look back at my life at the age of 62, what the gerontology literature calls life review, one of the things that I am most appreciative of is that I never killed anyone and I was able to get out of harm’s way before it destroyed either my body or soul. I appreciate all the good people along the way who have helped me with my substantial post-traumatic stress.